Jailhouse Baby
by Hunger4Righteousness
Summary: Megamind finally reveals the little-guessed reason of how and why he grew up in prison. Takes place at the Lair with Roxanne, post-movie.


Setting down her drink and waving her hand near her temple, she said, "I can't understand it. How- and why, for pete's sake – would a child be allowed to grow up in a prison?"

He smirked to himself. "There is a simple explanation, you know. The most obvious one." As yet, no one had figured it out, not even Roxanne.

Her eyes shifted as she frowned. An obvious explanation? "Well, call me slow, but I can't think what that might be."

"Oh, I could hardly call you that." Hadn't she nearly figured out his plan to create a hero? "I _wanted_ to be there."

She stared at him as she repeated his statement. "You _wanted_ to grow up in prison." Squinting a little, she asked, "Didn't you tell me you were eight days old when you left your planet?"

"Yes."

"And you arrived here in a fairly short amount of time, so you weren't even close to being as much as a year old, or even half a year old, when they found you there in the yard, in your pod, right?"

"Right again."

"But you want me to believe the infantile you had decided, 'I think a prison would be a super place to grow up!'?" She bridled skeptically. "Come on. Did you even know what prison was?"

"No, admittedly I didn't. But I did know one important thing. And it was the focus of my life from the time I left my parents' hands."

"And that was…"

He leaned forward, eyes intense. "Whatever happened to me was my _destiny_."

She stopped to consider that. "Ok. I know you've told me before about your father's parting words. Besides the fact that you understood him, which is fairly unbelievable in itself, you also want me to believe you could comprehend the concept of destiny? And you were actively seeking your destiny?"

"Yes, why not?" Leaning on his arms on the table, he asked with genuine interest, "What were you thinking about at one month old?"

She looked at him, considering whom she was talking to. "How many babies have you been around here?"

"Not many. Why?"

"Because human infants generally have two things on their minds – eating and sleeping."

He paused, raised an eyebrow, and asked dryly, "That's it?"

"Pretty much. Unless you count diaper changes too."

He grimaced and muttered. "It's amazing your people are actually walking upright."

"Hey!"

"Well, obviously I'm even more alien than we thought. The point is, yes, the focus of my life from early on was to seek out this… thing, idea, concept, whatever it was… that my father said I was destined for. I didn't know what it was. I missed that part in all the confusion at the time of my departure. But they sent me here, and I landed _there_."

That illuminated things. "Oh! So you actually thought that's where you were _supposed_ to be."

"Yes. So you can see now why I didn't want to leave. I believed it was fate. That's where I landed; that's where I meant to stay." He folded his arms and sat back as though he'd made up his mind all over again to remain in the circumstances that destiny had provided.

"Ah ha. I get it now." She nodded. "But. That still doesn't explain how you managed to _remain_ in prison. You were a baby. Certainly they wouldn't have consulted you about what you wanted and even if you'd told them, they could hardly have agreed to let you grow up there. Didn't they try to send you away? Put you in the foster care system, adoption, anything?" She patted the thirty-odd year old newspaper spread out in front of her. The warden had been quoted several times on the front page about the blue infant following the discovery of his dramatic and unexpected arrival. He'd kept mentioning the child's alien skin color and oddly shaped head as proof somehow that he was 'not right' and sure to become a troublemaker. "The article here makes it sound as though they never even considered trying to find you a home, which makes no sense. You don't raise a baby in a jail, I don't care how strange he looks."

"Hey!"

"You know what I mean."

He sighed, and then pondering further a crooked smile crossed his features. "I think maybe the warden was simply trying to cover up the embarrassing truth."

"Which was what?"

"They couldn't keep me out!" He laughed. "A mere infant – totally owning their high-tech security system! Ha! Such as it was."

She blinked a few times. "Huh?"

"They did try to send me away. Put me in several foster homes." He smiled, remembering. "I always made my way back again. You should've seen their faces when they'd discover me back in my cell, safe and sound." He was positively beaming at the memories.

"I almost hate to ask, but how did you manage that?"

Chuckling again, he assured her, "Oh, I had my ways. For one thing, the rare foster family that might have been prepared to overlook my physical appearance quickly returned me to the warden with any number of excuses when I began to take apart their belongings."

"You destroyed their stuff to get sent back?"

"No," he scoffed. "Roxanne, despite what anyone may think I wasn't born bad. And I wasn't destructive just to make trouble. Do you realize the sheer amount of 'stuff' that fills normal people's houses as compared to a prison cell? As soon as I'd arrive, my little oversized head would fill up with ideas of what I could create from parts of lamps and toasters and TVs and radios. Their houses were simply a feast of raw material to my incredibly active brain!" His eyes lit up at the mere thought of creating. "I even took apart most of a car once when I was two."

"Oh my gosh!"

"Yes, and I borrowed vehicles several times in order to get back to the prison. Sometimes they didn't make it back to their owners in exactly the same condition as I'd taken them."

"No wonder you kept getting sent back!"

"Yes, usually." His face clouded suddenly. "There was one couple that didn't seem to care very much about their precious things though. They were very patient with all my tinkering. Interested in it." A look of sadness came over his features. "Until they found out they were expecting their own child."

Roxanne opened her mouth to speak but felt at a loss for words. "That's terrible," she finally said softly. She reached out and touched his hand lying on the table. "I'm sorry."

He looked at her hand covering his and turned his own over so their palms met. He smiled ruefully. Rejection had been a way of life for him since the beginning. It was acceptance that he now found difficult to comprehend. "Well, it only reinforced what I'd believed all along. That prison was destined to be my home, and after that I made sure I stayed there."

"So tell me about making trouble at school." She pulled her hand away again, not unkindly but in order to jot something on her notepad. He watched her hands wistfully. "They weren't trying to make you live there. I would've guessed you'd have thrived in an instructional environment."

He gave her a look. "Roxanne, while they were learning 'Itsy Bitsy Spider', I perfected the basic concept for the dehydration gun. It was all a bit beneath me."

"Oh."

"I did wish to go to school, having become very interested in people and life outside the prison once I'd gotten a taste of it in the foster system. Plus I'd stalled out on figuring out what my destiny might be in the prison. There didn't seem to be much more I could accomplish there. And of course, once I met Wayne and all his soft-headed groupies and became the object of their scorn - well, you know the rest."

"You didn't give in to being bullied though."

He drew himself up. "Of course not. That's not in my nature. They impressed upon me that I would never be one of them, so it seemed obvious that my role was to oppose them. That appeared to be what they wanted and expected. So I did." He smiled wickedly. "I did it very well too!"

She couldn't resist a snicker, recalling the report she'd read on the blue explosion and his subsequent expulsion. "You can say that again!" He shot her a look, wondering if he should repeat himself, but she composed her face and continued. "But once you were kicked out of school…"

"I wasn't just kicked out of school. Wayne hid it! Spoil sport! He couldn't stand that I'd managed to get some of my own back on him and his feeble-minded followers."

"Right, well, your school career was effectively ended. But you thought you'd found your destiny. So what did you do then?"

Sitting back, he explained, "Ah, that's when the Warden and I began to butt heads." Pointing at his own, he exclaimed, "And considering the size of this thing, he was doomed!"

Roxanne laughed outright. "So you started making trouble in prison?"

"Oh yes, I put myself to the test and got plenty of practice being 'bad', now that I believed I was destined to be the enemy of society and all do-gooders. Not only that, but that's when I decided my time in prison had reached the limits of its usefulness." He shook his head. "I was finally ready to leave, and then they wanted me to stay! So you see, I've always been working against the system."

Roxanne gave a soft snort of disbelief. "No kidding! First they wanted you out; you wanted to stay. You wanted friends; they wanted an enemy. You finally wanted out; they were ready to keep you there." She asked, "Didn't you ever feel discouraged by all that opposition? I mean, even the teacher was against you. Most kids find an ally there." Many hardened criminals were formed under less stressful conditions than his, and yet she sensed he really had retained a sensitive nature and a basic core of goodness.

Shrugging he commented, "Certainly. I'm not heartless. But you know what they say: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So I became stronger." His face softened as he added, "Minion supported me too. Good old Minion. Not that he encouraged me to be 'evil', but his unfailing loyalty was sometimes the only reason I never gave up hope. That and the knowledge that we were actively working toward what I sincerely believed was the destiny my father had promised me."

"You know, in a funny way, that is truly admirable."

He blinked in surprise. "Really?"

"Well yeah, because your intentions were still good. Deep down, you were trying to do what you thought was right, even though that meant doing wrong." She smiled at him and pointed with her pen. "Really, you've been trying to please your father your whole life. And I might even be so bold as to say that, unconsciously, you were trying to give the people around you what they wanted too." Little Wayne had wanted to play hero, and he needed a villain. And he got one. Later Megamind had certainly seemed to enjoy playing up to the crowds of people who gathered to watch any of his evil plans unfold. He was a natural showman, but what she suspected he really wanted was to be accepted.

He felt unsure of how to answer that. Yes, he'd always hoped his parents would be proud of him but giving people what they wanted? "Hmm, maybe."

Maybe introspection wasn't something he indulged in enough. "Wrap your massive intellect around that for a while. In the meantime, think I have enough to start my next story." She rose from the table, and he stood up as well. "Thanks for the coffee." Their mugs had been emptied and refilled and emptied again long ago. A trip to the lair was never a short visit these days, something she'd thought about several times since assuming her role as the biographer of Metro City's new hero. Time always got away as they chatted or argued or laughed, usually all three. She smiled at him and gathered her things, stowing them carefully in her tote.

Giving other people what they want. He found that unsettling somehow. Had he really been doing that all along? A question formed on his lips before he considered whether or not he should ask. "What about you, Roxanne? You couldn't say I gave you what you wanted."

She stopped. "Well, I can't say being kidnapped repeatedly was on any of my Christmas lists." Thoughtfully she admitted, "But you were the reason my career took off. I went from being just another reporter to being a minor celebrity. It was great for my job security too!" She grinned, having known that as long as she continued to star in Megamind and Metro Man's battles, she would always keep her job. It made the annoyances of being 'bait' and a fake 'girlfriend' easier to bear. "So, I guess, yes. I'd have to say you did."

Amazing. Maybe it was just due to her upbeat nature. She seemed to want to take a positive view of things. "So what do you want now?" He felt like kicking himself for blurting out such a question. Too late, he thought, waiting for her answer while his fingers plucked nervously at the edge of his cape.

Roxanne slowly resumed stowing her materials in her bag and then looked up at him thoughtfully as a slow smile spread across her face. "I'd like to enjoy getting to know you better."

A rush of relief warmed him from the inside. Looking her in the eye, he offered sincerely, "I think I can do that for you."


End file.
